The War on Mediocrity

April 2011

April 29, 2011

"For all its flaws," writes Dan Visel at With Hidden Noise, "Mexico City seems much more alive, more full of possibility, more creative, than New York does right now." I guess I must agree; despite having spent no time in New York, I now find myself scheduling a fall trip to the Distrito Federal. The project of stuffing my unconscious mind with information about Mexico City led me to discover, along with dozens upon dozens of intriguing galleries and eateries, the Condominio Insurgentes, the D.F.'s equivalent of Pyongyang's Ryugyong Hotel:

One difference between the Ryugong Hotel and the Condominio Insurgentes: people actually live in the Condominio Insurgentes. The scant information available holds that, once Mexico City's swankest building, it now hosts mostly single mothers, illegal Cuban or Colombian immigrants, squatters, and part-time brothel operators. One upper floor burnt up twenty years ago, never to be restored to livability. Totally abandoned after some disgraced politican jumped to his death out of it — or after someone killed a judge in there; I can't quite figure out which — the top floor holds nothing but dusty old furniture. Mexico City's 1985 earthquake seems to have put the final nail in the building's coffin, though it lives on, zombielike — with about as much maintenance as a zombie gets.

Given my interest in urban design, disastrous efforts thereof, and the dead buildings that result, I feel amost fated to want to know more about the Condominio Insurgentes. I only have enough Spanish to draw out the broad outlines from forum posts and Youtube comments and such, but from what I can tell, it came up as the first Latin American mixed-use complex of its scale. I've read that, aside from the occasional decades-shuttered bar with half-full beers still sitting on the tables, plenty of shops still operate on the bottom floor. (The letters spelling "CANADA" down the side once indicated the presence of a "Canadian shoe store." Your guess is as good as mine.) Stories conflict as to what goes on on the other nineteen; matters of whether and what sort of people occupy them come down to a haze of conflicting guesses.

Mexico City first came to fascinate me when I learned that Paul Verhoeven shot most of Total Recall's Earth scenes there, barely bothering to disguise the place. Much of the film's subway action actually happens at the Metro Insurgentes station, not far at all, as you'd expect, from the Condominio Insurgentes. They also burnt a lot of film in a military academy just outside the city which Verhoeven praises on the DVD commentary track for its New Brutalism. This gave me the impression that triumph-of-the-planning-committee architectural statements dominated Mexico City, but my visions of a northerly Brasília turned up false. It just doesn't seem like the kind of place where those projects can get much of a foothold; we have more examples of boldly socialistic architecture in the States.

Still, word on the street has it that the Condominia Insurgentes stays in disrepair due to what strikes me as a very Soviet-bloc reason: multiple owners and/or managers, none of whom have a specifically delineated set of responsibilities, exist in irresolvable deadlock. I suppose that, when something breaks, none of them wants to address the complaint and thus become the lightning rod for all the other complaints. And jeez, you could find a lot to complain about on the exterior alone. Sure, a fire tore through some of it, but buildings don't just fall apart like this, do they? Even though it comes after decades of neglect, this sheer dilapidation makes me think someone must've taken a very low-bidding contractor, if not Ryugyong low.

You'll find the Condominio Insurgentes in the Colonia Roma — also known as the neighborhood where Peter Greenaway film composer Michael Nyman lives — at La Avenida de los Insurgentes #300, between Queretaro and Zacatecas. I couldn't find it conventionally listed, so I had to tale a little walk on Google Maps' street view to find it. Luckily, the building pops out pretty distinctively on the local skyline:

April 27, 2011

I devour filmmaker interview compilations. Paul Cronin’s Herzog on Herzog and Vernon and Marguerite Gras’ Peter Greenaway: Interviews sit atop the heap, but Ludvig Hertzberg’s Jim Jarmusch: Interviews, which I’m now plowing through, might approach their level. The editor’s task of sifting through hundreds upon hundreds of print-media conversations, be they digital files or yellowed clippings or rolls of microfiche, sounds Herculean enough, but I have to believe these books do 51 percent of their standing or falling on some combination of the filmmaker-subject’s clarity, honesty, and willingness to both repeat and, when necessary, self-contradict.

Not that Jarmusch flip-flops much. I get from him the sense of a man with strong aesthetic, political, and production-related convictions — much stronger, in the first two cases, than any convictions I can hold. But when it comes to his personal ethos of working with friends, writing stories around those friends, and shooting within budgets that let him retain control of his movies — Jarmusch operates as the fullest possible embodiment of the much-thrown-around concept of independent filmmaker — I hope to hold myself to the very same rules. After Stranger than Paradise set Jarmusch’s first big wave of popularity rolling in 1984, incredibly unappealing but presumably lucrative directorial offers poured into his office — Porky’s sequels, Porky’s clones, and clones of Porky’s sequels, as I understand it — and only time will tell if I can lash myself to the same mast. With any luck, I’ll simply avoid success!

Which brings me to Jarmusch’s hatred of ambition. Often, filmmaker-interview-compilation editors inflate their own workload by trimming the occasions when the filmmakers repeat themselves. This makes a certain kind of sense — any creator operating from an even somewhat solid philosophical platform occasionally makes the same points over three decades of conversation — but I’d rather they didn’t. To me, the filmmaker’s essence resides in those repetitions. (It resides in the contradictions, too, but it especially resides in the repetitions.) Going on the evidence in Jim Jarmusch: Interviews, Jarmusch hates a few things I like, including Los Angeles, El Topo, and ambition.

When anyone whose work I love hates things I like, I feel I have to go back and reconsider those things. I find Los Angeles too well-geared to my preferences for a city to turn my back on. (I do suspect that Jarmusch, like any diehard New Yorker, feels the standard moral obligation to loathe L.A., a loathing that only runs in one direction.) Alejandro Jodorowsky made El Topo too brazenly to avoid alienating (at least) half his viewers, so someone else disliking it wouldn’t surprise me — but I can’t get enough of it. (I admit to a little surprise, though, that Jarmusch himself shot my other favorite acid western.) Ambition, though; should I re-evaluate ambition?

It feels heretical even to consider letting go of ambition. How can you accomplish anything without it? In his interview with Tao Lin, Michael Silverblatt cops to having avoided Lin’s work due to his distaste for the sort of ambition that must drive a mid-twentysomething who can generate like six books and a constant stream of publicity. But then he found out that Lin writes about depression, which complicated things: Lin’s ambition alienated him, but Lin’s depression drew him in. “I don’t like ambition,” Silverblatt protests, and Jarmusch makes similar claims throughout his book of interviews. Yet he has become one of the most respected and artistically successful filmmakers in America. Zuh?

In Permanent Vacation, Jarmusch presents an ambition void of the gapingest kind. Alongside my reading of interview compilations, you see, I’ve been watching various filmmakers’ first features: Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, Aaron Katz’s Dance Party U.S.A., (past Marketplace of Ideas guest) Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha, Peter Greenaway’s The Falls — I’ll probably re-watch Christopher Nolan’s Following again too, since I remember it being pretty damned cool. These films offer the clearest possible view of a young director’s, er, ambitions. I can only conclude from Jarmusch’s first that, while not quite as devoid of ambition as his answers to journalists’ questions would have us believe, he mostly works up ambitions about not having ambition, at least as conventionally understood. His characters don’t want money, nor do they want fame, nor do they want love. But they all want something.

One of classmates in Japanese often talks about his first trip to Japan. With next to no money, he hitchhiked around the country, living on gas-station onigiri and handouts from friendly families. (From what I understand, this approach to traveling plays better in Japan that in, say, Russia.) Even while cringing about the discomfort and demoralization of such an experience, I envied the crap out of the guy for having it. Our teacher asked how he could possibly have done it. “I guess I’m just a bum, he concluded.”

You could call Aloysius Parker, Permanent Vacation’s protagonist, just a bum. He would probably state it with more beatnik-y eloquence. Lacking employment or any non-institutionalized family, Aloysius roams freely through decimated late-seventies N.Y.C., establishing the rich Jarmuschian structure of the eccentric’s journey from the orbit of one fellow eccentric to another. He makes his teenage- pompadour-wearing, herky-jerky-proto-rockabillying way from a slip-clad, Lautréamont-reading ladyfriend to a delusional ‘Nam vet to a slow jokester loitering in a theater to a lonely saxman. He also visits his insane mom, steals a car, sells the stolen car, and hops a boat to Paris. All part of, as he says during the final bit of narration, his permanent vacation.

Jarmusch’s interviews reveal that the film has a wide documentary streak: Chris Parker, who plays Aloysius, actually lived like this, never working, bouncing from couch to owned-by-someone-who’s-barely-an-acquaintance couch. Sometimes Jarmusch and his crew couldn’t find Parker when it came time to shoot, but they only had to call around to get an idea of where he might surface next. By taking Parker’s lifestyle and building a full-length, color-saturated, hauntingly atmospheric cinematic drama around it, Jarmusch somehow ambitiofies the unambitious. It helps the film’s mythos even more that he financed it with scholarship money meant to pay his tuition, which pissed off N.Y.U. enough that it denied him his degree.

But lacking the old piece-o’-paper does not seem to have hurt Jarmusch’s career. An innate need to make films has propelled him forward ever since, credentials be damned. I find something hugely appealing in this combination of the drive to create with no particular desire for success. I can easily imagine a fixation on “making it” tripping up a filmmaker like Jarmusch, or, worse, rendering him vulnerable to the siren song of the play-it-safers offering a sizable payday to sit in the folding chair on “Meatballs meets Raiders of the Lost Ark.” I think of it as a close cousin to Aloysius Parker’s need to live in precisely his own way; if he tried to concentrate on both living like that and, say, getting an MBA, it’d make him stumble. Drive without ambition seems to produce interesting things; drive with ambition has, to my mind, started to seem slightly poisonous.

April 21, 2011

I’ve always distrusted my unconscious mind, and I only now realize how that’s screwed me. Someone recently mentioned to me that he learned English and Japanese by exposing himself to those languages in their “real and raw” states with media made by and for native speakers. Therein lies the case for immersion: envelop yourself with the language you want to understand, and your brain cranks toward comprehension even when you’re not actively studying it. I guess Bart Simpson learned French that way, though when I first saw that episode I felt terrified by the mere prospect of someone expecting me to learn a foreign language, much less in a country that expects me to speak it. “But how?” my five-year-old self would have pleaded to know. “But how?”

Learning musical instruments presented the same problem. I understood the process as having to do with hours upon hours of physical familiarization with an instrument, of listening hard to other people play that instrument, and, above all, of listening hard to yourself play it, but I couldn’t mentally map that out in a way that convinced me it would work. Hence my early struggles with and avoidance of new means of expression linguistic, musical, or otherwise. I didn’t so much find the tasks themselves difficult as I found breaking my mental block about the idea of the tasks and the precise mechanics of their culmination impossible.

That David Ogilvy observation I quoted a little while ago keeps looping in my head: "Big ideas come from only one place: the unconscious. Nobody's ever had a big idea by a process of rational thought.” He spoke of having to “flog himself” to read through all the technical material on the new Rolls-Royce, but only when he’d ingested it, then ingested a big dinner and settled in with a nice bottle of claret, did his unconscious mind produce a way to advertise it. (“At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”) That this process works now seems clear to me, or at least as clear as I find anything, but the how of it badly tripped me up for the longest time. I could never summon any faith in anything other than conscious, deliberate reasoning. It still trips me up, but slightly less often now that I have an awareness of it.

Naturally, I now wonder how to harness these automatic processes of my unconscious mind — the cycles of thought always running in the background, if you will — to best stuff-making and/or stuff-doing advantage. My attempt to psychologically “place” myself in Los Angeles before moving there in September involves writing a list of “alternative” L.A.-based novels for The Millions, and thus reading a bundle of them in preparation. A coming trip to Mexico City necessitates similar relevant-cultural-product absorption, including but not limited to Alex Cox’s El Patrullero and books like David Lida’s First Stop in the New World and Daniel Hernandez’s Down and Delirious in Mexico City.

Gearing up to devote a much larger portion of my life to filmmaking, I’ve been cramming my mind full of material on the nineties U.S. indie wave that originally inspired me; material on the working methods of kind of filmmakers who tend to have to fend for themselves, financially, intellectually, and aesthetically (Jarmusch, Greenaway, Godard); and the cheap, freewheeling, convert-every-glitch-into-an-artistic-choice first pictures from these directors. And since I feel compelled to imbue my own next film with the spirit of Jorge Luis Borges, you know I’ve been cramming down some labyrinths.

But the unconscious mind — or at least my unconscious mind — needs a hell of a lot of time to chew on this stuff, and that gives me trouble. In my experience, it does its work so slowly that I never notice the progress in real time, only as sudden epiphanies — but so, it seems, did Ogilvy. It also demands that I break my unwillingness to take in what I don’t understand immediately and completely, like the movies, internet videos, and TV dramas in Japanese, Korean, and Spanish that feed those languages, raw, whichever part of my brain can process them involuntary into something resembling linguistic skill.

Sure, I can’t diagram how all this allegedly happens, but would I want to? As I just heard Adam Carolla say on Fitzdog Radio, if you envision life in its totality and everything it requires of you, you’d never do anything. If you think a second floor would look good on your house, you have to put your head down and just act on the vision. If you ponder about all the hassles with lawyers and architects and contractors and zoning and materials, you’ll go straight to bed instead. But if you stare at your feet and take a step at a time, sure, it’ll take twice as long and cost twice as much as the estimate, but ultimately, that second floor will be there, you’ll have stories to tell — and you’ll have actually lived. So, bonus.

April 19, 2011

Hun Jang’s Rough Cut (영화는 영화다) exemplifies what I’ve come to think of as a specifically Korean subgenre: the gangster movie about a gangster movie. Gangsterism must have become an astonishingly common film subject over there — and, if my small sample tells me anything, it has — to spin off so meta and yet so viable a species. This one doesn’t quite rise to the level of Ha Yu’s A Dirty Carnival, the last Korean gangster movie about a gangster movie that I watched; it plays more in league with Dong-hun Choi’s straighter-up The Big Swindle.

A troubled gangster-movie star keeps accidentally beating up his co-stars, which forces him to recruit an actual gangster to play opposite him. This opens up three different layers of reality: the film, the film within the film, and the “real life” making of the film. I had high hopes for these maneuvers, but they stop short of the cleverness I expected. Wikipedia helpfully catalogs them: “Choreographed fights become ‘real’ and a ‘real’ fight turns out to be planned but is however ‘real’,” “the actual movie script for Rough Cut is shown being read and held several times by rehearsing characters and crew within the film,” etc. Positively Godardian! Yet Rough Cut burns a bit too much of its energy on slickness to really embody that spirit. True, its $1.5 million budget amounts to little more than bigtime studios spend on canapés, but this material needs a $15,000 movie — er, a 16.2 million won movie — shot on the streets. That, or it needs a deep revision that makes it into a more savage satire of the Korean Hollywood’s bankably glossy gangsterism — but then it would have to compete with A Dirty Carnival.

Qu-duk Hwang’s For Eternal Hearts (별빛 속으로) comes as a member of another specifically Korean subgenre, one I have an entirely tougher time pinning down, though I can tell you that they contain a lot of ghosts without quite turning into horror shows and flashbacks to important historical periods without quite turning into historical dramas. And you know what this particular example reminded me of? A Haruki Murakami novel. Specifically, it reminded me of Norwegian Wood, in that both that book's protagonist and this film’s protagonist flash back to their collegiate years in an era of student protest. Yet both protagonists have infinitely less interest in revolt than they do in the alienated, impulsive, and/or dead girls who repeatedly cross their paths. Murakami’s Toru Watanabe majors in drama, but the lead dude here studies German literature — and actually studies — so you get to hear a lot of Koreans speaking German. I don’t know about you, but my life doesn’t offer that every day.

One major difference between For Eternal Hearts and Norwegian Wood: whereas Japan’s student protests, like those in Europe and the States, went down in the late sixties, Korea had theirs in the late seventies and eighties. Meaning that Korea’s “Baby Boomer” generation, with all the attendant cultural force, now enjoys the same fortysomething prime ours did a quarter-century ago. Hence all the references to main characters’ relatively recent street fighting years even in pictures as blockbusting as Joon-ho Bong’s The Host. Too young to tire of American Boomers when they really dominated things, I look forward to tiring of Korean Boomers any year now. I await even more eagerly a rough-and-ready, pre-disillusioned Korean Generation X and the Slacker-y, Clerks-y films they must surely produce.

Speaking of Joon-ho Bong, you know what I appreciate that he violates? The cinematic sacrosanctity of dogs. A rarely spoken law seems to dictate that, in most countries, to allow any dog to come to lasting harm will, at a stroke, alienate your entire audience. In Barking Dogs Never Bite (플란다스의 개), Bong has a lonely security guard who habitually kidnaps dogs and turns them into stew in his improvised kitchen, a shambling homeless wanderer who would do the same if he had the means, and a junior academic who dispatches a couple of pups — pitching one straight off a roof — out of sheer frustration at his inability to land tenure without bribery. He also throws in the would-be professor’s wife, who for a while comes off as a total man-eating drone (and who, in seemingly the ultimate act of betrayal, buys one of those fragile-looking accessory dogs), and a small-time vigilante who goes into action mode by cinching tight her bright yellow hoodie.

When I watch an established filmmaker’s early movies and enjoy them, I usually enjoy them for, as I tend to put it, how much “cool stuff” they contain. For whatever reason, the most interestingly ambitious directors tend to break out of the gate with projects build out of a variety of disparate, separately amusing and/or impressive components. Bong gets bits of ridiculousness from all over the apartment complex around which the film revolves: the staff’s lore of “Boiler Kim” who haunts the basement; the stern but powerless matron who obsesses over her endlessly barking pet; the nearby gift shop, depressingly packed with chintz. He loads this stuff into a blandly realistic urban setting but occasionally uses it for brief flights into preposterous subjectivity, as when Ms. Yellow Hoodie makes a mad dash to save another endangered little dog, she sees on the rooftops around her crowd after crowd of cheerer-on-ers all clad in, yes, yellow hoodies.

April 15, 2011

Despite having endured years and years of lukewarm expectancy about his movies (“Surely the next one will work as cinema. Hmm. Okay, the next one, then...”), I think I may worship Kevin Smith anyway. So he wears black hoodies and billowing jorts. So he writes scripts where characters say lines like “I didn’t have a roadmap to sexuality.” But damn, not only has he put together an uncommonly unified life and work, he’s hypnotized me with the sheer power of his words. I’ve listened to, like, six hours of The SMODCast in the past two days. And I have other things I need to listen to.

In my experience, the show’s formula works like this: come for the astonishing fact that Smith and co-host/producer/pal Scott Mosier can release wave after wave of dick jokes and observations about Namor the Sub-Mariner and actually make you laugh with them; stay for the weirdly penetrating insights about living life and making stuff. For these guys, living life and making stuff seem to have merged into one and the same, which I’ve long assumed the only viable long-term way to play it. They crack the dick jokes, make the Namor references — indeed, Namor dick jokes — shoot the movies, and record the podcasts, each as facets of the same big... thing. Therefore, any given subject, no matter how seemingly vulgar or juvenile, can well lead to observations that remind me of just that of which I must be reminded.

So first, on an episode where they talk about the details of their self-distribution plan for the upcoming Red State — a film that has drawn mainly eerily reserved responses so far, but never mind — Mosier points out that, when it comes to making stuff and getting it out there the way you want, you can’t truly fail. God, that sounds trite when I type it out, but bear with me: he and Smith go on to explain that, if you do your thing and all goes “successfully” according to plan, sweet — and you’ve got the story to tell on a podcast. If you do it and it sinks, well, then you’ve got, like, three stories. Doing = winning, in some sense, no matter what. Not that they spelled it out this way, but you also enjoy the self-respect that comes with acting on your ideas. You don’t get it as a consolation prize for forfeiture; in fact, I fear you don’t get anything.

Second, on one of the shows where they recall their days at the Vancouver film school where they met, they discuss the making of their first documentary short, Mae Day: The Crumbling of a Documentary. Groups had to come up with a documentary idea and pitch it to the class, so Smith and Mosier, simply wanting to win, came up with this super-earnest speech about nobly bearing cinematic witness to the gender journey of Emelda Mae, a local transsexual. This won over their classmates, as designed, but then the guys realized they didn’t actually want to do a project so fakily high-minded. Luckily, Emelda Mae suddenly skipped the country, which offered Smith and Mosier the chance to have actual fun making a jokey, self-deprecating movie about their failure to produce the cinematic gender journey, etc. Mosier drew a lifelong lesson from this: unless your projects amuse you, and thus you can amuse yourself making them, you’ve probably got nothin’.

Third, and in the same episode, Smith brings up a post from You Are Not So Smart about “present bias.” The relevant research found that, the sooner a subject had to watch a movie, the stupider a movie they would pick to watch. Which movie did the subject want to watch next week? Schindler’s List. Which movie did the subject want to watch right this second? Mrs. Doubtfire. This comes as old, old news to those interested in things procrastinatorial — that post even invokes the marshmallow kids — but perhaps it took a couple of Namor-dick-joke-making podcasters to bring my mind back to it.

“There is no future,” Smith says. “The future is an illusion.” The sharp, supremely capable, immaculately organized future versions of ourselves do not exist, so we’d do well not to lard them with all the challenges and responsibilities we feel unable to handle today. You won’t find future-you substantially more able than present-you — or you might, but it doesn’t help to assume you will. I feel I should make one of these claims: either “Whatever you’re not doing now, you’re not doing” or “Whatever you wouldn’t do now, you wouldn’t do at all.” A tired point, perhaps, and one I’m sure I’ve made before, but I consider my most of my thoughts about the past and future wasted, irrelevant: the present winds up dictating both of them anyway.

Despite the energizing observations from Smith and Mosier that moved me to write it, the process of cranking out this post has laid upon me an overwhelming weariness. Maybe I’ve simply grown weary of relaying things people have said about doing stuff, no matter how inspirational. Maybe the element of self-amusement has dissolved. So I guess I’ll stop doing it — right now.

April 12, 2011

Many of today’s thirtysomething men enjoy lifestyles that accommodate marriage, children, and Batman. They rejoice at having painstakingly precision-engineered an arrangement that includes everything I don’t want from grown-upitude and nothing I do. Part of me envies them; just imagine the elation they felt upon realizing that they could have the wife, the kids, the mortgage, the driveway — and still care deeply about how Hollywood adapts The Silmarillion. Yet I know in my heart of hearts that I don’t belong in their ranks.

I ask of adulthood only that it foist upon me neither marriage nor children nor a house near only other houses, and that it allow me the freedom — nay, the mandate — to worship Yasujirō Ozu. If all those other guys relish legitimately fathering offspring yet still spending hours upon hours getting awesome at Rock Band, I would relish playing it the other way around: if they can meet their adult familial responsibilities and abdicate their adult cultural responsibilities, I can meet my adult cultural responsibilities and abdicate my adult familial ones.

Do these men who drag their unreconstructed childhood fixations into big-monthly-nut domesticity have a label? Try as I might, I can’t think of anything sufficiently catchy; surely some trend piece has beaten me to this. I feel surrounded, at least in a zeitgeist-y sense, by peers laboring under what, in their position, I would personally consider a few too many bills, a few too many mouths to feed, and a few too many serious concerns about the Spider-Man reboot. Amid this way of life’s strikingly wide spread, I do admit to wondering where my fellows are, the ones for whom any given work of Andrei Tarkovsky trumps even the most deluxe package of holy matrimony and reproduction. And who aren’t seventeen. And who shower on the daily.

I have no clear sense of where to find them, yet I do have a hunch that, when I’ve moved to L.A., what I plan to make my constant presence at Cinefamily, American Cinematheque, and LACMA’s film program will bring me closer to the tribe. But would I really make a health move in surrounding myself with totally like minds? Instead of circling the wagons with a bunch of slightly underweight childless dudes and collectively bemoaning the Oulipo’s lack of continued influence, should I instead run with the pack of slightly overweight, semi-bearded “alternadads” even now heatedly trading opinions about Zack Snyder? Lord knows what kind of problems the Godard acolytes have. Better the devil I know?

April 11, 2011

My poor life choices have lead me to prize two things: infinite patience and full books available free on the internet. Henepola Gunaratana’s Mindfulness in Plain English, available in the tubes as a PDF, hits both birds with one stone. Ask Metafilter’s hive mind recommended it again and again in old threads I’d read with titles like “How do I clear my mind?”, “Help me learn how to think straight”, “I fear my brain is trying to destroy me”, and “OH JESUS GOD MAKE THIS MENTAL YAMMERING STOP.” I felt the universe somehow “guiding” me toward the book, and hey, price’s right.

My very search through those threads would suggest that I suffer from concentration issues. I do, but only as an effect of the much larger problem of living locked in a struggle with my own mind. Intellectually, I believe that my mind = my brain = my personality = me, but in day-to-day reality, I feel forced to constantly suppress something internal that generates wave after wave of impulses to hide, turn solipsistic, and generally puss out, translating everything into its own conceptual language of fear, despair, and laziness. It makes its presence known at all times, whatever it is, but it never feels like me.

Recent months have seen my desperation to silence this... this thing rise to terrible heights, so I’ve cast around for solutions in places I wouldn’t normally. Living in and — let’s face it, being of — California, the epicenter of North American flakiness, I hesitate to approach anything with “mindfulness” in its title or meditation in its subject, but the passages I’d read quoted made too much sense to write off. For example:

We usually do not look into what is really there in front of us. We see life through a screen of thoughts and concepts, and we mistake those mental objects for the reality.

[ … ]

Early on in our practice of meditation, we need to rethink our underlying assumptions regarding conceptualization. For most of us, we have earned high marks in school and in life for our ability to manipulate mental phenomena — concepts — logically. Our careers, much of our success in everyday life, our happy relationships, we view as largely the result of our successful manipulation of concepts. In developing mindfulness, however, we temporarily suspend the conceptualization process and focus on the pure nature of mental phenomena. During meditation we are seeking to experience the mind at the pre-concept level.

Actually, now that I pull this stuff out of context, it sounds a little more granola than I’d like. The clunky prose may have something to do with it; clunk tends to bring with it a certain veneer of over-earnestness. But clearly I walk a dangerous line here. I do find that my dependence on throwing around words and concepts messes me up, but when I acknowledge that, how safe a distance can I possibly keep from the whole “everything is everything” and “the limits of language mean nothing is true or false” trips so beloved of sky-high undergrads? I consider it one thing to acknowledge communicative limitations; I consider it quite another to use them to absolve yourself of all intellectual responsibility.

Gunaratana doesn’t help his credibility when he makes claims that the sufficiently advanced meditator “achieves perfect mental health, a pure love for all that lives and complete cessation of suffering,” or when he makes groan-inducing reference “Western science and physics.” I highlight these particularly sketchy bits not to make the book as a whole seem sketchy, but to crank up my nonsense threat alert level. So much in this book strikes me as correct that I feel a heavier burden of responsibility to give the stink eye to the parts that don’t.

I mean, jeez, I don’t want to belabor this, but the word “mindfulness” alone — it just calls up so many horrific images of 36-year-old women driving hybrid vehicles brimming with extra pairs of yoga pants. But Gunaratana comes at a working definition of the term from a few different angles, none of which have to do with wind chimes. He calls it “non-judgmental observation,” “that ability of the mind to observe without criticism,” to see things “without condemnation or judgment” but only “a balanced interest in things exactly as they are in their natural states.” This includes yourself: “You see your own selfish behavior. You see your own suffering. And you see how you create that suffering. You see how you hurt others. You pierce right through the layer of lies that you normally tell yourself and you see what is really there.”

Again, grand. Probably too grand. But I’ve arrived independently at similar conclusions, or at least suspicions, in recent years. I certainly have the experience of neurotically building and protecting a fragile structure of self-mythologizing B.S. around myself. I’ve experienced the useless divisiveness of opinions, especially in settings where, as Tao Lin once blogged, “it distracts from existential despair and loneliness when people type a lot of abstractions to try to defeat someone else's likes and dislikes.” Speaking of abstractions, I’ve slowly leaned away from them and toward — how to put it? — concretions, an idea that sort of provides the core for this whole book, visible when Gunaratana writes something like, “Your body is a tool for creating desired mental states.” And you know I’ve tried to grasp all this with a mind he describes as “a shrieking, gibbering madhouse on wheels barreling pell-mell down the hill, utterly out of control and hopeless.” But apparently everyone’s does that.

April 07, 2011

Maria Bustillos’ excursion into David Foster Wallace’s private self-help library reminds me of my own past fascination with self-help. Wallace’s introduction to the stuff came, as we fans all now realize, through addiction and recovery. Mine came through — I don’t know, grim awe? I could never quite believe that an entire industry grew from such thin, unpromising soil. Leaving aside all those rich questions about their effectiveness, the very existence of motivational speakers became a particular interest. Part of me demanded to know how they could possibly do that job. Another part of me demanded to know how I could get that job.

Errol Morris once researched a project about self-help in America (I wonder: should we consider self-help a distinctly American phenomenon? Nick Hornby’s publisher told him his novel How to Be Good would sell a lot of copies specifically here to buyers mistaking it for a book about literally that) but scrapped it, leaving it, to my mind, one of the most intriguing studies I’ll never see. Errol Morris and self-help: can you envision a starker clash of sensibilities? Then again, a decade ago I’d have said the same about David Foster Wallace and self-help. Morris and Wallace: smart! Artful! Intellectually satisfying! Tasteful! Seemingly cynical yet really empowering! Self-help: dumb! Artless! Intellectually impoverished! Tasteless! Seemingly hopeful yet really enervating!

In viewing it as a grotesque spectacle, I don’t know how much my enthusiasm for things self-help differed from, say, a Gen-Xer’s enthusiasm for late-night public-access television. But as with anything ostensibly pitched so far away from me, I worked up a curiosity about the nature of the minds to which it did appeal. This turns out to lay close to one of the coriest of Wallace’s core concerns: can we possibly act, always and everywhere, on the assumption that all the other people around us possess fully realized inner lives too? Can we ever consistently see them, in all their consciousness, as more than bit players in the grand drama starring us?

As at least a B- Wallace reader, I’ve recently come to think of this as the question of the man’s fiction, and perhaps most of his nonfiction. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s GQ review of Wallace’s posthumous The Pale King mentions “his frequent and uncharacteristically Pollyanna statements about the supposed power of fiction against solipsism, i.e., that only in literature do we know for sure we're having "a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness." Later, Sullivan gets Wallace’s abilities in this arena across with an imaginary scenario:

Imagine walking into a place, say a mega-chain copy shop in a strip mall. It's early morning, and you're the first customer. You stop under the bright fluorescents and let the doors glide closed behind you, look at the employees in their corporate-blue shirts, mouths open, shuffling around sleepily. You take them in as a unified image, with an impenetrable surface of vague boredom and dissatisfaction that you're content to be on the outside of, and you set to your task, to your copying or whatever. That's precisely the moment when Wallace hits pause, that first little turn into inattention, into self-absorption. He reverses back through it, presses play again. Now it's different. You're in a room with a bunch of human beings. Each of them, like you, is broken and has healed in some funny way. Each of them, even the shallowest, has a novel inside. Each is loved by God or deserves to be. They all have something to do with you: When you let the membrane of your consciousness become porous, permit osmosis, you know it to be true, we have something to do with one another, are part of a narrative — but what? Wallace needed very badly to know.

I, too, have started feeling the need to know, which makes me think that, to the extent Wallace developed the ability “to prove to us that everyone's complicated, that when people seem simple and dull, it's we who aren't paying attention enough, it's our stubborn inborn tendency to see other people as major or minor characters in our story,” or, as Bustillos writes, “to erase the distance between himself and others in order to understand them better, and trying visibly to make himself understood — always asking questions, demanding to know more details,” he had some kind of superpower, the one that busts apart what Paul Graham calls “the most difficult problem in human experience: how to see things from other people's point of view, instead of thinking only of yourself.” Bustillos quotes Wallace as saying, “I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person.”

My natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

[ … ]

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

I’ve got to tell you, part of me has come to long for this anti-solipsistic power to experience everyone’s complexity, to erase the distance between myself and others, to automatically pay serious attention and have a meaningful conversation. Hence, I think, my recent years’ mass jettison of opinions — I have, like, four left — and preference for the concrete over the abstract. But another part of me does not long for this, does in fact suspect that, when you absorb everyone else’s perspective into your own, you lose your direction. I think of the Sunday Calvin & Hobbes where Calvin, bombarded with information by neo-Cubistly seeing all perspectives at once, finds himself totally immobilized.

Perhaps I really shouldn’t think of myself as the protagonist. But aren’t I the protagonist? I understand that I could surely derive great happiness — probably some emotion transcending happiness — by cutting myself down to size and refusing to privilege my story over others’, but how can I ever do the kind of work I can respect — the kind, uh, David Foster Wallace did — if I burn all my energy empathizing with the rest of humanity? While I loathe the notion that I’ve ever considered another human being simply an obstacle to my ambitions, I can’t deny having those ambitions. But speaking of protagonists, see also Wallace’s assessment of the protagonist of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time: “It never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole.”

April 06, 2011

Despite his high articulateness, Werner Herzog seems to consider himself inarticulate. I suspect this means something. I spent the weekend watching a retrospective of his documentaries put on by Cinefamily, possibly the world’s finest organization and certainly one of the main engines driving my move to L.A. (Herzog himself regularly wrong-foots journalists by praising what he thinks of as the unmatched vibrancy of L.A.’s culture, of which I would now call Cinefamily a bastion.) Watching his footage of shimmering mirages, grinning tribesmen, flaming oil wells, scampering desert foxes, medal-bedecked African dictators, and superstitious throat-singing Siberians — after, of course, re-reading the relevant sections of Herzog on Herzog — I though, “Man, this guy just does stuff.”

Point being, Herzog does not appear to live in words. He uses words, but he denies them primacy. David Lynch does this too, and in recent years has discussed publicly how he uses Transcendental Meditation to “fish” for the ideas lurking in his unconscious mind. Last night I watched “Pope of Modern Advertising” David Ogilvy on The David Susskind Show. Ogilvy said something I had to tweet as soon as I heard: “Big ideas come from only one place: the unconscious. Nobody's ever had a big idea by a process of rational thought.” He described how he might read a five-foot stack of materials on the Rolls-Royce or whatever he needs to advertise, but that the actual idea for the ad doesn’t come until he settles in with some after-dinner drink. Or, as Lynch might say, “Somewhere there's all the ideas, and they're sitting there and once in a while one will bob up and the idea is made known suddenly. Something is seen and known and felt all at once, and along with it comes a burst of enthusiasm and you fall in love with it.”

Herzog often talks about the “big metaphors” his films contain — Fitzcarraldo’s steamship pulled over the hill, Stroszek’s endlessly dancing chicken — and always quickly insists on his total ignorance of their meanings. They force him to abandon words, or force words to abandon him. (An example, perhaps, of the creative process I laid out in another tweet: “(1) Make your mind as interesting as possible, (2) build a gateway for others to get into your mind.” A validation of Herzog's famous dictum that, to become a filmmaker, you must only "read, read, read, read, read"?) Contrast this with me; I’ve noticed I can’t do anything unless I neurotically explain, re-explain, and re-re-re-explain it to myself in words. How could pulling a steamship over a hill and filming it ever survive that squirrely process?

I have to pound myself to take actions in the concrete world with endless sheets of language, and I too often remain utterly intransigent until absolutely self-convinced. Alas, the elusiveness of airtight arguments — let alone my suspicion that, for most worthwhile endeavors, no rational arguments even exist, airtight or otherwise — ensures that, in the time I take to formulate them, the opportunity passes. Studying Korean, Japanese, and even Spanish helps with this by forcing me to think not of words themselves but of the “actual things” to which they refer. (Herzog’s knowledge of many languages even beyond English and his native German — merely coincidental?) Yet I remain a long way from allowing action in the concrete world to assume the place of primacy I’ve let language usurp. Praised from early childhood for my “way with words,” I labor under a natural inclination to believe that language can accomplish anything. It can’t; it mostly accomplishes the easy task of tangling me up in its net. So I’d better cut this post off right here.

April 05, 2011

Film writer/director/produce/actor. I loved watching movies like Ghostbusters, Total Recall, and Raiders of the Lost Ark as a kid. A form of childhood logic (that has only strengthened itself since) told me that, if I enjoy them, I should spend my life making them. But as a die-hard play-alone-in-my-room only child, I couldn’t bear the idea of collaborators tainting my vision. I figured that, come the opportunity to make my own Ghostbusters, I’d simply do every job and play every role myself. In the meantime, I wandered around in front of a VHS camera I found in the house and then gave up.

“Author.” As soon as I learned to read them, what we tots called “chapter books” became my main source of pleasure in life. A pursuit even more solitary than movies? I’m down! I decided to make a career out of writing my own chapter books, but lacking the fortitude and/or patience to write thousands of words — even a thousand words — I typed up a series of pamphlet-like “books,” illustrated them with colored ball-point pens, and seeded them in my classroom’s library. When I realized actual books could take whole hours to write, I gave up.

Comic artist. (I hated the term “cartoonist.”) Finding myself even more excited by the possibilities of, to quote Scott McCloud, “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the reader,” I burned a significant fraction of my childhood hunched over Calvin and Hobbes, Tintin books, FoxTrot, and, slightly later, Peter Bagge's Hate. Absolute control over words and images; what could appeal more strongly to my near-autistic creative sensibilities? Crazed with desire to imitate all this, I spent endless hours drawing comics, but then saw how many of my friends were beginning to get into drawing comics as well. Sensing mild competition ahead, I gave up.

Video game “maker.” If anything thrilled me as much as reading books alone, watching movies alone, or drawing comics alone, playing video games alone did. Actually, that overstates my isolation; I often enjoyed playing two-player games with friends or, more often, being in proximity to friends as we all individually played different games. But my desire to create video games inevitably came to match my joy in playing them. Alas, my technical and disciplinary incompetence also rose to the occasion. I laboriously copied programs out of BASIC instructional manuals, understanding nothing. I carted around a stack of C++ manuals, understanding nothing. I found game-creation applications that allowed me to avoid programming, but they mostly enabled my tendency to start project after project, laboriously crafting one character’s walking animation before burning out and giving up.

Indie auteur. Discovering film for real as an adolescent, I immediately delved into the oeuvres of all those bootstrapping, put-the-budget-on-your-credit-card independent filmmakers of the nineties: your Kevin Smiths, your Quentin Tarantinos, your Richard Linklaters, your Robert Rodriguezes. (I read Rodriguez’s Rebel Without a Crew like a hundred times, pretty much.) As soon as video commentary tracks came along, I knew I had to join their ranks; I mean, they sounded so cool, so funny, so into stuff. At 16, I interviewed for an internship at this one Seattle media collective and blew the interviewer away with my single-minded focus. “Wow,” she said, astonished, “you really know what you want to do. When I was your age, I just had no idea.” I didn’t get the internship and never did like the idea of having to herd actors or ask adults for money anyway, so I gave up.

David Sedaris. Seeing David Sedaris give a live reading, I couldn’t believe (a) how hard he made me laugh, and (b) that he’d found a way to get paid for traveling around and reading funny stories out loud. Standing onstage, alone and near-motionless, while hundreds stare at me in rapt, unchallenging appreciation? Where do I sign? When I recalled how many compliments my writing abilities had drawn in school, I figured I stood next in line for the job. Sedaris’ example spurred me on to write more, to write things other than reviews of stuff I watched on video two weeks ago for my own web sites. Or at least it spurred me to think about that; whenever I actually tried it, the mortal enemy that is my brain chanted the same chorus it always does: “This sucks. Who would ever want this? This sucks. Who would ever want this? This sucks. Who would ever want this?” Convinced, I gave up.

Brian Eno. I first read Brian Eno’s A Year with Swollen Appendices just before leaving for college. The book comprises Eno’s diary entries from the year 1995. From what I could discern about his day-to-day, he seemed to do pretty much whatever he wanted, including but not limited to “enlarging bums in Photoshop,” hanging out with the likes of David Bowie, Anton Corbijn, and Steward Brand, cooking risotto, and thinking about ambient music, often by himself. Gots to get me some of that, I thought. But given the obvious impossibility of becoming another existing person at that grain of detail, can I really say I gave up?

Charlie Rose. Watching Charlie Rose one night, it suddenly struck me how much I’d love the world to see me on a show with a solid black background and unbroken by commercials. Also, Rose seemed friendly with all of his guests, no matter the industry they came from: publishing, politics, entertainment, journalism, wherever. “This guy can probably just call up Brian Grazer and say, ‘Let’s hang out,’” I thought, stunned. “What would that be like?” I have since worked hard on acquiring the interviewing chops, although my shoddy, improvisationally constructed social skills probably need a Herculeanly basic, foundational teardown-rebuild that I don’t even want to think about.

These days, I have settled on making myself into one-quarter Brian Eno, one-quarter Charlie Rose, one-quarter Werner Herzog (or maybe Peter Greenaway), and one-quarter whichever essayist I like most at the moment. I also want to make myself into someone who realizes the essentially pathetic nature of a 26-year-old man who frames life in terms of what he wants to be when he grows up.